1.2 Organisations’ Disability Rates and Reporting

Latest Data: 2020

This page reviews the differences between what organisations and individuals report regarding disabilities.

Highlights

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In 2020, data were gathered on disabled staff from employers, as has been the cases since the 2002/03 Profiling the Profession project.

However, the 2020 project, for the first time, also surveyed individuals and asked about their disability statuses. This was done to determine if all disabled staff report their disabilities to their employer(s); not all do, which is their right. Employers reported that 2.8% of archaeologists working for them in 2019-20 were disabled, while 10.5% of individual archaeologists reported that they were disabled, almost three and a half times the level that employers were aware of, but slightly lower than the overall representation of disabled people in the UK workforce.

Table 1.2.1: Respondent organisation’s staff and the UK workforce who identify as disabled, 2002-2020. Individual responses for 2020 included. UK Workforce data covers employed people with disabilities defined under the Equality Act 2010, aged 16-64, and are from the Office of National Statistics: “A08: Labour market status of disabled people“. Changes to how ONS collected data in 2013 led to an increase in the number of reported disabled people.

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Extrapolation of past trends

While it is likely that under-reporting occurred in the past and that the true number of disabled archaeologists was higher than reported in previous Profiling the Profession reports (all only asked employers), the authors are unaware of any data that could be used to determine the shape of that potential under-reporting, so any discussion will be speculation at this point. Other work in this area also only surveyed employers and not individuals (Employing People with Disabilities: Good Practice Guidance for Archaeologists. Tim Phillips & John Creighton 2010).

Assigning Motivation

Caution should be taken with speculatively assigning motivation to why some archaeologists do not report their disabilities to their employers. In future Profiling the Profession projects it might be possible to ask questions to better understand why this occurs.

Image Credits

On Site with Operation Nightingale and Breaking Ground Heritage by Wessex Archaeology. From Flickr CC BY NC 2.0

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